Authorities had issued their highest-level red alert ahead of the storm's arrival, though by Monday morning that warning was downgraded to a tropical storm classification as Dolphin began moving inland. The risks, however, are far from over. Warnings of severe flooding, torrential rain, and the potential for landslides remain in place through Wednesday across multiple provinces.
The disruption to transport has been significant. In Shanghai alone, 1,400 flights were cancelled ahead of the storm. Popular landmarks and tourist sites have been closed, including parts of Disneyland and Legoland, as well as several viewing platforms along the Bund, the famous riverside promenade in Shanghai's city centre. Ground-floor businesses in the former French Concession district were reported to be flooded, with people walking through ankle-deep water in an area normally busy with visitors. Footage circulating on state media captured the extent of the inundation in the city's streets.
The Affected Regions and the Scale of the Response
The storm's footprint across eastern China has been enormous. Parts of Zhejiang province are forecast to receive between 250 and 500 millimetres of rain over the coming days. In Wenzhou, authorities relocated around 900,000 residents and opened more than 1,000 emergency shelters to accommodate those displaced by the storm. In the nearby city of Taizhou, approximately 390,000 people were evacuated from their homes. Local governments across the region urged residents to avoid any unnecessary outdoor activity, and authorities in Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang, waived parking fees across all public spaces to encourage drivers to seek shelter from the wind and flooding. In the coastal province of Fujian, dozens of passenger ferry routes were suspended and over 100 offshore construction projects were halted.
Heavy rain was forecast to continue on Monday across the provinces of Shandong, Henan, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, as well as Shanghai. A nine-year-old boy from Wenling in Zhejiang was reported missing after being swept into the sea, though Chinese officials had not released any confirmed casualty figures at the time of the latest updates. State broadcaster CCTV described Typhoon Dolphin as an unusually large and long-lived storm, noting that it had travelled more than 6,000 kilometres before making landfall, giving it a lifespan more than three times that of an average typhoon. Its circulation size and rainfall capacity were both described as exceptional.
Misinformation Emerges Alongside the Storm
The arrival of Typhoon Dolphin also brought a wave of misinformation across Chinese social media platforms, prompting a response from authorities. State media reported that two individuals had been detained for spreading false content related to the storm. A 60-year-old man was found to have used artificial intelligence to generate a fake video falsely claiming that someone in Shanghai had fallen from a building during the typhoon. A second man, 32, had re-edited storm footage originally posted by other users in a manner deemed misleading by authorities. Both cases resulted in detention, reflecting the seriousness with which Chinese authorities are treating the spread of inaccurate information during the emergency.
Before making its way to mainland China, Typhoon Dolphin had already brought significant disruption to the Philippines, parts of northern Taiwan, and Japan's Okinawa island, leaving a trail of weather impacts across a wide stretch of the western Pacific before its dramatic arrival on the Chinese coastline.
